Let him be traced now in retreat. Pursued by a superior army and seeing his cavalry defeated, he turned as a savage lion at the Carrion, nor would he have removed so quickly from that lair, if the bridges at Palencia and Baños had been destroyed according to his order. Neither is his cool self-possession to be overlooked; for when both his flanks were thus exposed, instead of falling back in a hurried manner to the Duero, he judged exactly the value of the rugged ground on the left bank of the Pisuerga, in opposition to the double advantage obtained by the enemy at Palencia and Baños; nor did the difficulty which Souham and Caffarelli, independent commanders and neither of them accustomed to move large armies, would find in suddenly changing their line of operations escape him. His march to Cabeçon and his position on the left of the Pisuerga was not a retreat, it was the shift of a practised captain. When forced to withdraw Hill from the Tagus, he, on the instant, formed a new combination to fight that great battle on the Adaja which he had intended to deliver near the Guadalaviar; and though the splendid exploit of captain Guingret, at Tordesillas, baffled this intent, he, in return, baffled Souham by that ready stroke of generalship, the posting of his whole army in front of Rueda, thus forbidding a passage by the restored bridge. Finally, if he could not maintain the line of the Duero, nor that of the Tormes, it was because rivers can never be permanently defended against superior forces, and yet he did not quit the last without a splendid tactical illustration. I mean that surprising movement from the Arapiles to the Valmusa, a movement made not in confusion and half flight, but in close order of battle, his columns ready for action, his artillery and cavalry skirmishing, passing the Junguen without disorder, filing along the front of and winding into the rear of a most powerful French army, the largest ever collected in one mass in the Peninsula, an army having twice as many guns as the allies, and twelve thousand able horsemen to boot. And all these great and skilful actions were executed by lord Wellington with an army composed of different nations; soldiers, fierce indeed, and valiant, terrible in battle, but characterised by himself, as more deficient in good discipline than any army of which he had ever read!